WASHINGTON - After a flood of last-minute sign-ups, President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul was on track to sign up more than 7 million Americans for health insurance by midnight Monday, government officials said.
The 7 million target, thought to be out of reach by most experts, was in sight on a day that saw surging consumer interest as well as vexing computer glitches that slowed sign-ups on the healthcare.gov website.
Two government officials confirmed the milestone, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter ahead of an official announcement.
Seven million was the original target set by the Congressional Budget Office for enrollment in taxpayer-subsidized private health insurance through new online markets created under Obama’s signature legislation.
That was scaled back to 6 million after the disastrous launch of healthcare.gov last fall. Several state-run websites also had crippling problems.
“We admittedly had just a terrible start because the website wasn’t working,” Obama said Monday on CBS Evening News, referring to the site’s rocky beginnings. “But given how gloomy I think everybody’s assessment was back in the middle of November, I’d say that we’re on our way to making sure that no American ever has to go without health care.”
But Americans who rushed to apply for health insurance Monday faced long, frustrating waits and a new spate of website ills on deadline day.
“This is like trying to find a parking spot at Wal-Mart on Dec. 23,” said Jason Stevenson, working with a Utah nonprofit group helping people enroll.
At times, more than 125,000 people were simultaneously using healthcare. gov, straining it beyond its capacity.
Officials said the site had not crashed but was experiencing very heavy volume.The website, which was receiving 1.5 million visitors a day last week, had recorded about 1.6 million through 1 p.m. CDT.
By midday, visitors to the site were getting an automated message alerting them that high volumes made it necessary to wait to set up an account or enroll in coverage.
The automated queuing system, which was also deployed in December when there was a rush of consumers to get health coverage, allows users to enter their email address to be alerted when they can access services.
Supporters of the healthcare law fanned out across the country in a final dash to sign up uninsured Americans.
People not signed up for health insurance by the deadline, either through their jobs or on their own, were subject to fines by the Internal Revenue Service. The administration announced last week that people still in line by midnight Monday would get extra time to enroll.
“People shouldn’t panic,” said Joanne Peters, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. “They should go to the site and do their best to get enrolled today. If they can’t enroll today, we will help them tomorrow.”
With the White House looking for a surge on the final day of enrollment Monday, Vice President Joe Biden greeted people visiting a Washington help center.
He told people at the Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School that once they have health care, they won’t have to stay in a job they don’t like. With younger applicants, he encouraged them to just do it for mom.
“If you’re not willing to give yourself peace of mind, give your mom peace of mind,” Biden said.
The website stumbled early in the day - out of service for nearly four hours as technicians patched a software bug. Another hiccup in the early afternoon temporarily kept new applicants from signing up, and then things slowed further. Overwhelmed by computer problems when launched last fall, the system has been working much better in recent months, but independent testers say it still runs slowly.
At Chicago’s Norwegian American Hospital, people began lining up shortly after 7 a.m. to get help signing up for subsidized private health insurance.
At a Houston community center, there were immigrants from Ethiopia, Nepal, Eritrea, Somalia, Iraq, Iran and other countries, many of them trying anew after failing to complete applications previously. In addition to needing help with the actual enrollment, they needed to wait for interpreters. Many had taken a day off from work, hoping to meet the deadline.
The insurance markets - or exchanges - offer subsidized private health insurance to people who don’t have access to coverage through their jobs. The federal government is taking the lead in 36 states, while 14 other states plus Washington, D.C., are running their own enrollment websites.
New York, running its own site, reported more than 812,000 had signed up by Sunday morning, nearly 100,000 of them last week.
The administration hasn’t said how many of the 6 million people nationally who had signed up before the weekend ultimately closed the deal by paying their first month’s premiums. While Republicans have pressed for that number, U.S. officials have said it isn’t available because a system to automatically transfer data between the government and insurers isn’t finished.
Also unknown is how many were previously uninsured - the real test of Obama’s health-care overhaul. In addition, the law expands coverage for low-income people through Medicaid, but only about half the states have agreed to implement that option.
Although Monday was the last day officially to sign up, millions of people are potentially eligible for extensions granted by the administration.
Those include people who had begun enrolling by the deadline but didn’t finish, perhaps because of errors, missing information or website glitches. The government said it will accept paper applications until next Monday and take as much time as necessary to handle unfinished cases on healthcare.gov. Rules may vary in states running their own insurance marketplaces.
The administration is also offering special extensions to make up for all sorts of problems that might have kept people from getting enrolled on time, including natural disasters, domestic abuse, website malfunctions, errors by insurance companies and mistakes by application counselors.
Potential enrollees can seek a special enrollment period by contacting the federal call center or the state marketplace and explaining what happened. It’s on the honor system. The extensions are for 60 days.
Those who still don’t get health insurance run the risk that the IRS will fine them next year for remaining uninsured. It remains to be seen how aggressively the penalties called for in the law are enforced.
Also, the new markets don’t have a monopoly on health insurance. People not already covered by an employer or a government program can comply with the insurance mandate by buying a policy directly from an insurer. They’ll just have to pay the full premium themselves, though in a few states there may be an exception to that rule.
Supporters of the law held their breath early Monday when the website was down.
The enrollment system on the site, healthcare.gov, was taken offline between 1 and 5 a.m. Administration spokesman Aaron Albright said the site undergoes “regular nightly maintenance” during off-peak hours, but the period was extended Monday because of a “technical problem.” He did not say what the problem was, but an official statement called it “a software bug” unrelated to application volume.
The rollout of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has been attacked by Republican foes and faced a U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed states to limit the expansion of Medicaid. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Monday that Republicans remain committed to repealing Obama’s law.
The law targets the nation’s 48 million uninsured, relying in large part on online marketplaces to sell individual and family health plans to people not covered at work or in a government program.
About 2 million adults under age 26 gained insurance coverage since the law’s passage in 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One of the earliest coverage expansions under the law was a requirement, effective in 2011, that insurers allow parents to include children under age 26 on their health plans.
The percentage of younger people who enroll using exchanges is important because they’re expected to use fewer medical services than older people. The more young and healthy people insurers cover, the less risk they face, reducing future premium increases.
Information for this article was contributed by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Connie Cass, Don Babwin, Randall Chase, Ramit Plushnick-Masti, Michelle Price, Carolyn Thompson and Josh Lederman of The Associated Press; by David S. Joachim of The New York Times; by Noam N. Levey of the Tribune Washington Bureau; by Alex Wayne, Steve Geimann and Caroline Chen of Bloomberg News; and by Amy Goldstein, Lena H. Sun, Sandhya Somashekhar and Juliet Eilperin of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/01/2014